In the midst of figuring out new site specifics and writing articles for tight deadlines, I almost completely forgot to mention that I had a client set a personal record in a little marathon down in Boston. Diane, the half woman half machine that I’ve mentioned in the past, managed to shave 7 minutes off her previous personal best (set last August here in merry ole Edmonton), while doing most of her training indoors due to a wicked winter that dropped more white stuff than Charlie Sheen with a case of the shakes.

In order to train her to hit this PR, I put her on a different system of training than she was used to for previous years, so I thought I would share it with everyone out there.

Diane’s one of those people who is pretty much built to run. She has been able to complete marathons and half marathons comfortably with no actual soreness or stiffness, and look to run again the day after. While this is an admirable trait, the biggest thing we had to work on during her training was to reduce her volume dramatically and work on speed development. It never ceases to amaze me when distance runner think that running the same speed for longer durations will result, somehow magically, in faster times. Thoughts like this are what make me as a trainer want to repeatedly kick myself in the face.

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5 months out:

During December, we focused on run technique with a combination of slow motion video analysis and heart rate algorythmic analysis which involved checking her heart rate in various techniques, speeds and inclines on various days and finding the technique that Diane ran the most efficiently with, which corresponded to the lowest heart rate with the highest speed. Couple this with figuring out her VO2 max through indirect measurements, and we had a recipe for action. By figuring out her VO2 max, it’s the equivalent of figuring out her 1 rep max for something like bench press. This allowed me to design a progressive overload program for her that revolved around her VO2 workload versus simply using heart rate or RPE.

We also did a lot of resistance training in heavy rep ranges. The goal was to increase her strength, force production, and power output while limiting the amount of mass she would gain, so heavy heavy weights were the key. On top of that, I wanted to get her to walk into the gym and say “I wanna throw around some heavy shit today!!!” but it never happened. Trust me, there’s not many 55-year-old females out there back squatting 1.5 times their body weight for femur-parallel reps, let alone females training for marathons. Unfortunately there’s still a misconception out there among the members of the endurance world that believe doing weight training 2 or 3 times a week will automatically make them grow thick body builder muscles and make them slower. Couple this with the multitude of overuse tendinosis injuries endurance athletes get because of a lack of technique, strength, and a desire to consistently do everything in their power to injure and maim themselves and you can see why I want to throw a pot of hot coffee into my eyes every now and then when training them.

“Hey Dean my legs are ridiculously sore today from running 30 kilometers yesterday, but I want to run another 30 kilometers today. What should I do??”

“Take the day off and stretch them, drink lots of water and maybe look at getting a massage.”

“But then I’m going to gain 40 pounds if I take today off!!! I have to run in order to not get fat!!!”

“Let’s do some exercises for your hips and core to take the pressure off your legs and help prevent an injury. Then you’ll be able to burn some calories and help to get your legs to feel better.”

“But I read in Shape magazine that doing squats will make your legs big. I don’t want to do that!!”

“My head hurts.”

So while we ironed out a few kinks from the previous season’s run technique, we started working on the actual act of making her more machine than human.

Her initial weekly run volume was limited to 30 km a week, broken into 4 runs per week. They were short, but the goal was to increase speed, leg turnover rate, and anaerobic threshold. None of these can be accomplished during long steady runs.

Her weight training program was broken into two days: Day one focused on heavy weights through compound movements, as well as core stability and proprioceptive exercises to help increase. Day two focused on plyometrics, sprinting, and active range of motion exercises to make sure she maintained her flexibility and ability to generate power through her full range of motion. We also worked on long-duration VO2 max work, essentially 2 minute intervals of >125% of her VO2 max intensity working on high incline running. Let’s just say she began to get completely freaked out about her upcoming workouts the night before.

3 Months Out:

We started to increase her running mileage at a gradual rate, moving from 30km per week up to 45km per week by the end of the month over a span of 4 runs per week. Again, we focused on training intensity and speed development instead of high mileage. Retesting her VO2 showed this was actually going well, as her VO2 max went from 58.4mL/kg/min in December to 63.1 mL/kg/min. Retesting her short-distance sprint time over 20 meters showed an average decrease of 0.17 seconds over repeated measures (hand measured, not ideal but still pretty good). Her 5km time trial time decreased by 52 seconds. For a fairly well-trained endurance athlete these are pretty good improvements!!

Strength training program was still set as a two-day split, following the same outline as before. Treadmill intervals were now bumped up to 3 minute intervals at >125% of her newly measured VO2 max, which meant a whole new world of hurt. For the first two weeks, she struggled to finish the intervals and sometimes wasn’t able to do it. By the end of the month she was able to finish the whole three minutes without issue.

2 Months Out:

We dropped her strength training intensity and ramped up her mileage in this phase. Since she was working on increasing her run volume the central nervous system demand of both long duration running and high intensity resistance training would be too much for her and not allow proper recovery. We focused on building anaerobic endurance through circuit training, ala, this:

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Sprint work was reduced in lieu of the increase in weekly run mileage, which went from 45km per week up to 65 km per week (two 15 km runs, one 10 km run, and a progressively increasing distance long run each week).

1 month out:

Run mileage peaked and long runs averaged between 28-40 km, with the 40 km run occurring the week before the marathon. I know a lot of purists would think this was ridiculous to hit such a high volume the week before a marathon, but in Diane’s case it worked perfectly, as it gave her the confidence to run it fast and hard, and she had absolutely no soreness or stiffness from it, so it worked out well in the end.

Week before:

This was her taper week, which involved two 10 km threshold runs, and little other training. Once she was in Boston, I had her do two 1 km sprint runs to loosen her legs up the day before the run, and to get her muscles pulling in glycogen to physiologically “carb-load” her up properly. She then proceeded to piss excellence everywhere and utterly dominate her own personal best from the year before by an incredible 3.5%, moving from 3:28 down to 3:21, and placing 6th in her age group along the way.

This type of program focused on shorter, high intensity runs and training above VO2 max to elicit faster run times. After running for 20 years, she’s managed set a personal best last summer, and then shave a full 7 minutes off that in Boston. We also played around with her using compression socks, which helped to reduce soreness and vascular pooling in her calves and helped improve her run times over the course of her training. I would recommend them for anyone looking to seriously increase their run performance, so give them a try.

This is the type of run program that I’ve used with a few experienced distance runners to prepare them for marathons, and it always manages to improve run speed and anaerobic threshold while reducing the instances of injuries compared to conventional high-mileage programs. I wouldn’t recommend this for someone looking to run their first marathon, but would rather recommend a full psychological evaluation to figure out why the hell they would want to do this kind of brutality to themselves. For beginners I would rather have them train for 10 km races and eventually into half marathons, and would normally want a beginner runner to take about 2 years to properly prepare to complete a marathon while feeling like they gave it a good try rather than simply crossing the finish line alive.

So if you’re looking to give a marathon a try in the near future, first give your head a shake, and then try to up the intensity, do some sprint work, work on fast running before you work on long running, and you may just eek out a PR along the way. While I’ve always said that if you have to get somewhere that’s 26.2 miles away, a car would be so much faster, I’m not going to turn someone away if they want to abuse themselves by trying to run it. I mean, just because the first guy who ran a marathon kicked the bucket doesn’t mean it will hurt you now, does it??